Good Morning Cake

by convivialist

Who ever said you couldn’t eat cake for breakfast?

Remember when you were a kid, those “fun packs” of tiny boxes of sugary cereals? You could buy, say, 2 boxes of each of Frosted Flakes, Fruit Loops, Apple Jacks, Corn Pops and Cocoa Krispies, all shrink wrapped together in a row? Alas, I was never allowed to have them, making those colorful little cardboard containers naturally all the more appealing.

Ok, I admit that I did not regress back to childhood and eat the Good Morning Cake – a four-layer vanilla cake with espresso frosting – for breakfast. I made this cake about two and a half years ago as part of an installation, for an ongoing project I did called Conzept Kiosk. Why I woke up yesterday dreaming about this cake, I do not know, but I felt it appropriate on my 30th (!) birthday to re-consider it. My words of wisdom discovered after three decades of life experience: I actually think that what’s on top of this cake is far more unhealthy for you than the entire cake itself.

How’s that for growing up?

In Conzept Kiosk, I would leave baked goods (or in its last version, entire cakes) on a stand on the side of the street. It began on a remote island in Finland and continued on a mixed-use urban street in Brooklyn. The absurdity of it all interested me. But the further goal was as follows:

To investigate an alternative mode of exchange and distribution, one in which there is an implicit sense of trust that goes beyond the unsaid but all too present sense of obedience and fear of manipulation that we all have experienced as a buyer and a seller. In our urban culture, we are often taken aback by generosity, even when it is sincerely offered, and regard it as suspect. In Concept Kiosk, however, there is a moment of sharing, of uninhibited exchange. My goods are vulnerable to the perusal of the “customer,” but the leaving of money is an acknowledgement of the value of my public offering. This subtle shift in the traditional model of consumerism posits the consumer as an active participant in a dialectical artistic exchange.